<p>@PizzaGirl - you are absolutely right - there are two sides to the “no way, no how” situation.</p>
<p>My older D refused to consider Princeton. A friend suggested a book that she should read. My D read the book, and is now a junior at Pton.</p>
<p>My younger D decided she didn’t want small liberal arts colleges. When she decided to pursue a BM, we went to Oberlin since it was relatively nearby (music applicants are a whole different ballgame); she fell in love with the place immediately.</p>
<p>So, it’s about finding balance, knowing when (as a parent) to push a bit, and when to back off. Just like when they were toddlers, pick your fights.</p>
<p>I have only skimmed the comments and while I agree you need to narrow the number there is something about getting a glimpse of the campus. I have read Blink and if your D’s have not then perhaps reading it beforehand will give them an insight into that gut split second decision. </p>
<p>My S quickly ruled out the majority of the northeast colleges because he did not care for the older crowded cities. My D on the other hand liked the old architecture and the bustle of the city. S did not care for anything too rural unless the campus was like a city itself (Cornell). Also as a parent you know your children very well and you can pick up things just like in Blink that may in the end help them when they are making a decision on where to apply or matriculate. My kids ultimatelly made their own choices but I was able to help clarify what might or might not have been factors in the fit. </p>
<p>Of course being flexible and deciding to forgo someplaces because of overload will help in being able to compile a list when the time approaches to apply otherwise many might be taken off the list simply because it was a blurred day. </p>
<p>I particulary liked getting DVDS from the collegiate choice website because a $15 visit helped us take a few colleges off our list. These dvds are not of the best quality but they are filmed on college tours so you get an idea of the lay of the campus. Also it is a great reference for later when you need to remember why you liked or did not like a particular campus. As a note some of the tours are older but in general it is better than just relying on websites and those other campus tour sites.</p>
<p>All those DVDs present everything in the prettiest light possible. Every campus has some gorgeous red brick or gothic building, every campus has a student center where people congregate, every campus has some kind of academic quad with beautiful old buildings. I wouldn’t find that of much use, personally.</p>
<p>Yeah so true but doesn’t that make the comparisons a bit easier? Some schools’ ‘best’ is going to be unappealing to you. I’m thinking that if you don’t like the DVD version of those attributes, and those attributes matter to you, you probably won’t like the real life version.</p>
<p>My point is that Unattractive School A and Very Attractive School B can look equally nice in DVD’s, since even Unattractive School A has a few buildings that can look nice when shot by a professional photographer in the right light.</p>
<p>Drive-bys don’t also give a real feel for those campuses where the bulk of the campus may be on a lakefill or other area that doesn’t allow vehicular traffic.</p>
<p>@startbright - Not really. Everyone’s best five minutes is about same. Some school will run out after 5 minutes while others could go on another hour. We don’t get to see that. I learn just as much from a few snapshot photos.</p>
<p>Parents, How do you feel when kids want you to drive on without getting out of the car? Don’t you feel a little let down? It happened to me once. I thought CC parents were saints to cheerfully drive on after investing the effort to get there.</p>
<p>The only way I ever did any “vacation” with my children was to let them plan what they wanted to see beforehand and then figure out the easiest way to make it happen. When they were really young I did have to explain some things (like the previously mentioned dragons) just weren’t possible. Others manage this better and get to see things they are interested in while the kids are young. For us, just going with the flow was easier. Our kids are close together in age so this wasn’t the whole of our lives.</p>
<p>We took them to see the colleges they wanted to see. Husband and I added two LAC’s to the list that the children didn’t want to see, didn’t want to apply to, and wouldn’t attend when admitted.</p>
<p>Schmaltz - here’s another approach for when your kids are a bit older. </p>
<p>I sat down with them and gave them a list of, oh, maybe 25 - 30 schools that <em>I</em> thought based on my knowledge of them would be choices for them to consider. Then <em>they</em> did the research and narrowed down the list and that’s what drove our itinerary. I still reserved the right for a few “mom insists” choices but that way they took things off the itinerary and felt more in control. Of course, that meant that we didn’t go see some schools I would have loved to – W&M and the Bowdoin / Bates / Colby trio come to mind as ones that fell off the list much to my chagrin. But I had to bring myself back around to - this was for them, not me.</p>
<p>I guess none of you have seen the dvds I’m talking about. These dvds are not the shiny promotional ones that colleges or some private companies might produce but are just like a video you would take on your own walking tour. Sure you are going to see what the tour guide shows you but there are also additional shots of other buildings (inside and out) and the surrounding campus, greek row etc… I have found that sometimes I was able to see how rural or urban the surrounding area was without actually visiting there. Saved ourselves time and money. Of course I also used streetview on google maps to see more of surrounding areas. I’m not related to anyone on that particular website. I am only saying that for $15 dollars versus travel, gas, time to actually go see the campus we were able to eliminate some schools and actually see the ones we were most interested in seeing.</p>
<p>For instance my D loved the dvd views of the area around Emerson. We knew it is right in the middle of Boston but seeing the neighboring area was helpful in determining if she wanted to consider an urban campus. Likewise seeing the nature areas around Skidmore brought out the desire to be in a parklike setting. Obviously there is a vibe on campus that you can feel when you visit but trying to see 25 colleges in a week sounds like torture.</p>
<p>Yes, they will blur. This time around my son tallied up 42 schools he visited. Some were his brothers’ schools that were quite distinct, and many were singular “on the way” visits and local schools that he was visiting for other purposes anyways. So he knew the local school schools quite well. It was more type, that stayed in his mind and he could clump certain schools together. And as he visited, he would discard towards the latter time period of visits. Why Gettysburg would be “In” and Bucknell “out”, I don’t know, but he immediately made that determination. Got a list together of about 15 schools, narrowed them to 4 out of the 13 yeas and then down to two and is first choice from the start, as soon as he visited, in the middle of his visiting spree, is where he is going.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people are pooh-poohing this idea because Schmaltz & Dghtrs won’t know much about any of the 25 colleges when this is done, and they will all run together, and it isn’t any different than looking at banks. All of which is true. But . . . </p>
<ol>
<li><p>If it’s colossally boring, presumably the Schmaltz family will be capable of adjusting their plans, and maybe visiting Cooperstown instead of Hamilton and Colgate, or going to Niagara Falls, or something. Maybe even (gasp!) looking at an art museum, or some place of extraordinary beauty. Just because they have an itinerary to look at 25 colleges doesn’t mean they will really have to look at 25 colleges if they aren’t having fun.</p></li>
<li><p>They won’t necessarily learn that much about the colleges, but they will learn something about themselves and each other based on how they react to different looks and contexts. That ain’t such a bad way to spend a one-week family vacation.</p></li>
<li><p>We did something like this with Stanford and Berkeley on a trip to San Francisco when my kids were a little younger than Schmaltz’s (8th and 6th grades). We basically strolled through the middle of each campus with no attempt to see everything systematically, but making certain we saw a bunch of high points. It made a big impression on both kids; they certainly remembered what the schools looked like 4-5 years later. It was meaningful in part because they had other context – they were very familiar with Penn, Yale, Harvard, and places like Swarthmore and Williams. Stanford and Berkeley were two whole other ways of arranging the elements of a college in geography. That was worth seeing, and didn’t require hours and hours to appreciate.</p></li>
<li><p>I would caution, however, that a “drive-by” doesn’t work for lots of colleges, probably most of them. Harvard, for instance – I doubt you can really see anything in a drive-by, and if you try you will probably wind up either rear-ending someone or being rear-ended. NYU – Don’t even bother trying. From a car, you probably can’t even tell what’s NYU and what isn’t. And the energy on the sidewalk is the best part of NYU. Please, Schmaltz, get out of the car at NYU! (And get a map so you can find the magnificent library.) Most small colleges don’t allow cars in the middle of campus, so you aren’t really seeing anything but the butt-end of the place unless you walk around. Even places that are relatively visible from streets – BU, Penn, Yale – tend to hide their best parts.</p></li>
<li><p>Cornell is worth a detour – maybe the only college mentioned that really is worth it for how it looks. Princeton, too, especially in spring or early summer. You may not need to spend more than 5 minutes at the Grand Canyon, but if you were driving through Flagstaff anyway you might take a couple of hours to have those 5 minutes, and feel like you hadn’t wasted your time.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My daughter (FirstToGo) and I did a one week east coast/mid-atlantic college tour spring break of her junior year … we planned on 10 formal tours (basically 2 a day) and managed to sneak in a bunch of other drive-bys or quick walk-throughs because other schools were essentially on route … and we ended up covering about 20 schools during the week … and I think it was a very productive week. </p>
<p>The concern I would have if this were my kids is that they might be too young for the trip … even if they are interested the odds their preferences change by the time they are seniors are pretty good and rather than remembering the pros and cons of each school they will only remember schools they liked or didn’t like which may not still be relevant to the 18 year old them.</p>
<p>schmaltz- I don’t think the ‘phonies’ ever make to Broadway. Unlike pseudo-singers like Taylor Swift, musical stage performers actually need to be able to sing live, and dance. No recording studio tricks and modifications (or fabrications) employed.</p>
<p>I’m sure the baseball game will be fun, though, and a whole lot cheaper. </p>
<p>As to the drive-through tour of colleges…encourage the kids to take some pictures for future reference. And don’t be surprised by the odd features that might impress or disappoint them: too hilly, wrong color buildings, odd footwear on the sudents. You might be amazed at their strange analyses.</p>
<p>I have to smile, because we just did a drive-by on Friday through Harvard and MIT because I wanted D to get a sense of them since she’ll also be attending school in Boston and her school has a relationship with MIT. I’ve been to both places before (walking around / touring) but D had not. It was about 45 minutes worth of sitting in traffic, trying to avoid hitting students and parents, and peering around corners (“see, honey? if you look through these gates, you’ll get a sense of what Harvard looks like!”). Honestly, it was pointless on my part – at least it had no impact on her choices in the first place. And it delayed us getting to the North End where we did a segway tour, which was a lot more fun than checking out Cambridge via car.</p>
<p>We try to find some point of interest at or near every college. There are times it isn’t possible, but we try. I was afraid that the 3 college in a day trip would shortchange those colleges, but my son was right on point with his assessments and is going to the middle school of that line up which was the one that got kinda squeezed. So it all worked well.</p>
<p>What’s a problem is sometimes you get a bad day, bad tour, bad tourguide, lousy admissions dept, at a great school, and it’s hard to shake that experience. Syracuse was one of such school for one of my kids as was Fordham for another. I ‘d seen both schools when things worked well, and our horrible tours were just one of those danged things that happen, but it’s tough to get that through some kids’ heads.</p>
<p>For kids the age of Schmaltz’s daughters, also don’t underestimate… if it’s a lousy day with lousy weather, it may unfairly cloud their perceptions of a place.</p>
<p>“I would caution, however, that a “drive-by” doesn’t work for lots of colleges, probably most of them. Harvard, for instance – I doubt you can really see anything in a drive-by.”</p>
<p>Agreed…Harvard does require some walking around.</p>
<p>I probably should have used the phrase “drive-through” or “drive-around” rather than “drive-by.” Since it will be in the summer, the vehicular and pedestrian traffic on campus should be low, making a drive through quite effortless. Also, parking should be easy. But in general, the shorter visits will be at places that almost certainly won’t be on the list a couple years down the line. I doubt if either of my kids (even the boy-crazy one) would want to go to a place like RPI, but it’s right on the way between Union College and Williamstown, so why not take 10 min. to just breeze through the campus or stop to powder noses? College buildings tend to have clean public restrooms, something which the predominantly female Schmaltz brigade will appreciate.</p>
<p>We visited Harvard during the summer and it was packed with people and unbelievable car traffic. In fact, that made it an unappealing school for my child…felt it was too touristy.</p>
<p>Actually we did a bit of “driving-by” on our recent college trip–after our tour at Amherst, we drove by UMass, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke, partly just to understand just how far the parts of the consortium were from each other. And I will say that you could tell some things about the vibe of those schools from the car, especially Hampshire.</p>